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Posts Tagged ‘Climate Change’

Two years after it last struggled with floods, the metropole is reeling once more

IN mid-2016 the River Seine in central Paris burst its banks. It rose to 6.1 metres, briefly closed the Louvre and Musée d’Orsay, disrupted trains and affected businesses and homes. The cause: intense rainfall in much of western Europe, which led to the worst flooding in the city for 34 years. Now the waters are back. By January 29th the river had reached the 5.8 metre-mark, causing similar disorder. Some 1,500 people have been evacuated from their homes. Rats are fleeing sewers. Locals at one vulnerable spot downstream from the city, Ile de Migneaux, told a newswire, L’Agence France-Presse, that they have endured eight swampings in two decades. Are such floods becoming more common, and more disruptive, in Paris? Den Rest des Beitrags lesen »

The coal-fired Plant Scherer, one of the nation’s top carbon-dioxide emitters, near Juliette, Ga.

WASHINGTON—Federal energy regulators on Monday rejected a Trump administration proposal aimed at shoring up struggling coal-fired and nuclear power plants to bolster the nation’s electricity grid, saying the administration hadn’t persuaded them the plan was needed to ensure the system’s reliability.

The administration plan, proposed in September, is one of its biggest initiatives to help those fuels compete amid a boom in gas-fired and renewable power. The Energy Department submitted the proposal, warning that so many coal-fired and nuclear plants are under threat of closing that the country’s electric grid faced a rising risk of outages and price spikes without it.

The five-member Federal Energy Regulatory Commission ruled unanimously that the administration hadn’t provided enough evidence that the measures proposed were needed. The commissioners—including four Trump administration nominees, three of them Republicans—said the government hadn’t provided adequate justification for changing the rules currently governing competitive electricity markets and that the proposal would have unfairly limited competition.

“In addition, the extensive comments submitted by [the country’s grid operators] do not point to any past or planned generator retirements that may be a threat to grid resilience,” FERC’s order said. Den Rest des Beitrags lesen »

Fires ravaged the West, hurricanes battered the East—and still emissions continued to rise.

For decades, scientists have warned that climate change would make extreme events like droughts, floods, hurricanes, and wildfires more frequent, more devastating, or both. In 2017, we got an up-close look at the raw ferocity of such an altered world as high-category hurricanes battered the East and Gulf coasts, and wind-whipped fires scorched the West.

We’re also seeing with greater clarity how these dangers are interlinked, building upon one another toward perilous climate tipping points. And yet for all the growing risks, and the decades we’ve had to confront them, we have yet to address the problem in a meaningful way.

In fact, despite all our climate policies, global accords, solar advances, wind farms, hybrid cars, and Teslas, greenhouse-gas emissions are still moving in the wrong direction. And as long as we’re emitting any at all, we’re only making the problem worse.

Here are the five most worrisome climate developments we saw in 2017.

Emissions are rising again

After three relatively flat years, greenhouse-gas emissions from fossil fuels and industry picked up again in 2017, rising an estimated 2 percent, according to the Global Carbon Project. The shift was driven by rising carbon pollution in China and India, which more than offset a slight decline in the United States.

The news punctured tentative hopes that the recent flattening was solidifying into a trend. Among other things, it means that our collective climate efforts haven’t even prevented greenhouse-gas levels from rising, at a point when we need to be radically cutting them. Keeping temperatures from rising beyond a dangerous 2 °C will require slashing emissions as much as 70 percent by midcentury, according to the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Den Rest des Beitrags lesen »

Ana Palacio, a former Spanish foreign minister and former Senior Vice President of the World Bank, is a member of the Spanish Council of State, a visiting lecturer at Georgetown University, and a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on the United States.

Dec 19, 2017Ana Palacio, Project Syndicate

With no looming crisis and only one major election in 2018, the coming year is on track to be one of relative calm for Europe, providing a rare opportunity for the European Union to make progress on long-term challenges, from climate leadership to migration. Three areas, in particular, stand out.

MADRID – It has become a cliché to declare, each December, that the next year will be a crucial one for the European Union. The pattern is familiar: Europe has a turbulent 12 months, driven by events for which it was not prepared, jerry-rigs a response, and resolves to address the deeper structural issues. Then the next year arrives, and Europe is again overwhelmed by events, and becomes trapped again in short-term crisis-response mode. Will 2018 break the mold?

The short answer is that it might – or, at least, it can. After nearly a decade of relentless drama – a financial disaster, followed by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and annexation of Crimea, the migration crisis, the Brexit vote, and the election of a US president who has called into question the transatlantic relationship – Europe is entering 2018 in a relatively stable position. Den Rest des Beitrags lesen »

Samuele Furfari is a professor of the geopolitics of energy at Université libre de Bruxelles, and author of The Changing World of Energy and the Geopolitical Challenges.

Dec 12, 2017Samuele Furfari, Project Syndicate

How we use energy is a hot topic for a warming world, and fears of pollution and resource strain have produced an arms race of energy efficiency solutions. But despite fears of shortages or threats from pollution, the planet has actually entered an era of fossil fuel abundance that shows no sign of abating.

BRUSSELS – How the world uses energy is a hot topic for a warming planet, and fears of pollution and resource strain have produced a virtual arms race of energy-efficiency strategies. From the European Union to China, economies are vowing to reduce their energy intensity with the help of technological innovations and legislative changes.

Yet, despite these promises, consumer demand for energy is forecast by the International Energy Agency to rise until at least 2040. With the world’s energy needs growing, how can policymakers guarantee supply? Den Rest des Beitrags lesen »

Justin Adams is Global Managing Director for Lands at the Nature Conservancy.

Nov 22, 2017Justin Adams, Project Syndicate

At the United Nations climate change meeting that just concluded in Bonn, Germany, global leaders reaffirmed that the world cannot respond adequately to rising temperatures if governments continue to ignore how forests, farms, and coasts are managed. Now that there is a firm consensus, governments must act on it.

OXFORD – In response to climate change, land is key. Today, agriculture, forestry, and other land uses account for roughly a quarter of global greenhouse-gas emissions. But adopting sustainable land management strategies could provide more than one-third of the near-term emission reductions needed to keep warming well below the target – 2°C above pre-industrial levels – set by the Paris climate agreement.

Conservation organizations like mine have long been working to balance the interaction between people and nature. But only recently have we fully grasped just how important land-use management is in addressing climate change. With the development of remote sensing, artificial intelligence, and biogeochemical modeling, we can better forecast outcomes, and develop strategies to manage and minimize adverse consequences.